Over the past six months,
Chatbots have dominated much of the tech conversation, the next big gold rush
in the field of online marketing.

Chatbots are built to
mimic human interaction, making them seem like an actual individual existing
digitally. It could live in any major chat product (Facebook Messenger, Slack,
Telegram, Text Messages, etc.), powered by basic rules engine or NLP and AI.

Chatbots have helped in
conversation commerce in real time such as booking a cab or ordering a bouquet
of flowers or pizza. Consumers will benefit from chatbots through
personalization, and this is where social media plays a big part.

Here are a couple of
other examples:

·Weather bot: Get the
weather whenever you ask like Poncho

·Grocery bot: Help me pick out and order groceries for the
week like Yana, MagicX

A chatbot for an airline will
function fundamentally differently from a banking bot.

People are now spending
more time in messaging apps than in social media and that is a huge turning
point. Messaging apps are the platforms of the future and bots as over 90% of
our time on mobile is spent on messaging platforms like Facebook messenger,
Whatsapp, Wechat, Viber etc.

Typically business need
to answer following questions to create a bot:

·Do you need a constant communication back and forth with the consumer?

·What are customers’
expectations for the interaction?

·How will the bot act?

·What happens when the bot
fails?

Chat bots have to be
great at answering questions, this is usually how they are challenged, and
IBM’s Watson is probably the best question and answer system.

There are several
advantage of Chatbots:

·24×7 availability – A bot
exists digitally unlike a human being, and can thus be pressed into service
continuously without any interference

·Faster response time than
humans, coupled with an AI, chatbot’s machine learning and multi-tasking
abilities make it a highly efficient virtual assistant

·Bots allow for a two-way,
personalized interaction between the consumer and a brand

·Saves Resources –
Employing a chatbot to handle basic customer interactions can free up valuable
human resources without a decline in productivity

Tacobot Allows to order
Taco Bell even more quickly.

KLM has a customer
service bot that's able to check your flight status and let you know if it's
been delayed.

Interacting with software
at a human level is becoming more mainstream from digital assistants like Google Home,
Google Now, Apple Siri.

Going forward people will not be able to tell the
difference between human and machine.

If your thermostat or refrigerator
is connected to the Internet, then it is part of the consumer IoT. If your factory equipment have sensors connected
to internet, then it is part of Industrial IoT (IIoT).

IoT has an impact on end
consumers, while IIoT has an impact on industries like Manufacturing, Aviation,
Utility, Agriculture, Oil & Gas, Transportation, Energy and Healthcare.

IoT refers to the use of
"smart" objects, which are everyday things from cars and home
appliances to athletic shoes and light switches that can connect to the
Internet, transmitting and receiving data and connecting the physical world to
the digital world.

IoT is mostly about human
interaction with objects. Devices can alert users when certain events or
situations occur or monitor activities:

·Google Nest sends an
alert when temperature in the house dropped below 68 degrees

·Garage door sensors alert
when open

·Turn up the heat and turn
on the driveway lights a half hour before you arrive at your home

·Meeting room that turns off lights when no one is using it

·A/C switch off when
windows are open

IIoT on the other hand, focus more workers safety, productivity & monitors
activities and conditions with remote control functions ability:

IoT is important but not
critical while IIoT failure often results in life-threatening or other
emergency situations.

IIoT provides an
unprecedented level of visibility throughout the supply chain. Individual
items, cases, pallets, containers and vehicles can be equipped with auto
identification tags and tied to GPS-enabled connections to continuously update
location and movement.

IoT generates medium or
high volume of data while IIoT generates very huge amounts of data (A single turbine compressor blade can generate more than 500GB of data per day) so includes
Big Data, Cloud computing, machine learning as necessary computing
requirements.

In future, IoT will continue to enhance our lives as consumers while IIoT will enable efficient management of entire supply chain.

Friday, 10 February 2017

How many times you have
listened to the advice of your friend/colleague or someone you know, to invest
in stock market? Many people have gained and lost their fortune with this guess
work and now younger generation is more scared to hand over their hard earned
money to someone for investing.

Until recently, you had 2
options for investments - either hire a human financial advisor or do it
yourself. Human advisors charge substantial fees starting minimum 1% of value
of assets to manage your portfolios. Do it yourself option requires lot of time
and energy and you may lose your money due to result of overtrading,
panic-selling during downturns, and trying to time the market as the issue for
many individuals is they aren’t cut out to go it alone

This is where robo-advisors
have scored more over humans.

A robo-advisor is an
online, automated wealth management service based on data science algorithms
with no or minimal human interventions that allocate, deploy and rebalance(spreading
your money in stocks, mutual funds, bonds to balance risks) your investments.

The robo-advisor industry
is in its infancy. Online life is migrating from persona desktop computing to laptops
to tablets and finally to mobile.

Here are some of the
advantages of using a robo-advisor:

·Cheaper
fees or free compared to traditional financial advisors

·Automatic
diversification into various options

·Easy
online access as we all are accustomed to shiny apps on mobile

·Safer
than picking your own stocks

·You
don’t need a degree in finance to understand the recommendations.

Robo-Advisors have
typically targeted millennials segment because these young investors want to
save & multiple money faster and often don't have enough patience & wealth to warrant the attention and
interest of a human advisor.

High Net worth
Individuals also think, online and automated investment tools can positively
affect their wealth manager's advice and decision-making.

Overall, robo-advisors
provide a good user experience with latest digitaltechnologies such as slick apps and fancy
interfaces. These platforms make sure that they fit right in with your
daily online browsing, and are great options for novice investors who are just
starting out and want to dip their toes in the world of investments, or for
people with a simple financial plan who just need an affordable,
straightforward place to start their retirement plans

Wealthfront &
Betterment are two popular commercial fee based robo-advisors available today.
In the Free category WiseBanyan & CharlesSchwab are making the ground.

But it won’t be long
before Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple get in on the robo-advisor industry.

Robo advice is certainly
here to stay, and it has its place in the wealth management landscape of
tomorrow. But what's missing most,
with robo-advisers is the personal touch. In this age of hyper-personalization, the lack
of a human element is one area where robo-advisors may fall short.

The robo-advisor can't
replace a trusted age old adviser, your elders have worked with, who lives
nearby and can rush right over in case of need, who knows you and your family.

Saturday, 4 February 2017

In very simple terms, Business model is how you plan to make money
from your business.

A refined version is how you create and deliver value to
customers. Your strategy tells you where you want to go and the business model
tells you how you are going to do it.

In this time of industry 4.0 with Digital Transformation, businesses are
getting disrupted faster than they get established. We all know what Apple did for music, Uber did for taxis and
Airbnb did for hotels.

Digital is helping them to enhance their existing
products and services and helping to launch new products and services.

Gamification
model : use of game like feature to simplify the interaction. E.g
Mint.com, Khan Academy, Nike +

Some of
the big companies moved on from their core business model and adopted to the change
embracing digital to get closer to customers in real time and grow
exponentially.

Nike had moved on from a sports apparel company
to fitness driven personalized wearables like FuelBand
manufacturer.

Amazon started in 1995 as on online book store
but went on to become leader in technologies like Cloud, Drones, web services.

Philips started as Light Bulb Company and moved
on to become leader in healthcare equipment’s touching millions of people
lives.

GE has moved forward from its core industrial
products – from jet engines and gas turbines to CT/PET scanners, locomotives
with sensors that monitor various parts of the machinery. They developed their
own Predix IoT platform with advanced analytics
to provide real time information to improve efficiency, increase productivity,
and schedule more effective preventive maintenance.